I'm a professor of natural sciences at the University of Coimbra. I need to tell you what I witnessed on October 13, 1917, in Fatima. I know how this sounds. I'm a man of science. I've spent my career studying observable phenomena, teaching students to rely on empirical evidence. What I saw that day defies everything I know about the natural world. Three shepherd children had been claiming for months that the Virgin Mary was appearing to them. The whole country knew about it. The youngest was only seven years old, for heaven's sake. Most people thought it was nonsense. I went to Fatima as a skeptic, you understand. A curious observer. Nothing more. The children said Our Lady promised a miracle on October 13 so that everyone would believe. Seventy thousand people showed up that day. Maybe more. The field was absolutely packed with humanity. People had walked for days to get there. It had rained all through the night before, steady and cold. The ground was mud, the crowd was soaked through, and the sky was grey and miserable.
I arrived around half past one in the afternoon. I positioned myself where I could see clearly, away from the worst of the crowd. I'm not a particularly devout man. I was there as an observer. A scientist. I wanted to see what would happen. For a long time, nothing did happen. I stood there in the cold, watching the children at the site where they said the Lady appeared. The crowd was restless. Some people were praying, others looked skeptical. A few were openly mocking. There were critics in that crowd, journalists from anti-clerical newspapers, government officials who'd come specifically to debunk the whole thing. Then, around two o'clock by legal time, maybe noon by the sun, the rain stopped. The thick clouds that had been covering the sky suddenly broke apart. The sun appeared between them. That's when I heard it. Thousands of voices, all at once, crying out.
The entire crowd, all seventy thousand people, suddenly turned away from where the children stood and looked up at the sun. I turned too, following their gaze. And there it was. The sun. But not the sun as I'd ever seen it before. I could look directly at it. Do you understand what I'm telling you? I could stare at the solar disc without pain, without the slightest discomfort. It didn't hurt my eyes at all. It wasn't like looking at the sun through fog, it wasn't veiled or dim. It was clear and brilliant, but it looked like a disc of mother-of-pearl. It had this strange luminosity, clearer and richer than normal sunlight, with something of the luster of a pearl. It had a clean-cut rim, perfectly defined. It looked like a glazed wheel. And it was spinning. Not twinkling like a star, but actually rotating on itself in this wild, dizzying whirl.
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